ncopa's thought was "raise an error" But how do you determine an
application error from a syntax error? (e.g. "you are not authorized"
is different from the syntax error, where we want to simply say "An
unexpected situation occurred.")

ncopa also suggested running the controller and view as pcalls. Here's
an example of how it could be done:

local status, err = pcall(myfunc)
if status == false then
etable.report(err)
end

<<<<<< SNIP >>>>>>>>>

The above code will run the etable.report and report the syntax error
(as exepected) If you commend out the "error" call, etable.report gets
a table back, rather than a string, and it will handle it differently.

This means it should be possible to send back a table or function to the
error MVC triad, logging the error, printing whatever is necessary, etc.

For the case of code syntax errors, or other LUA errors, a string is
returned, so the error MVC can handle that as a special "unhandled"
situation, and the web app can die gracefully.